Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a literary theorist and philosopher whose scholarship reshaped the humanities in American universities. Best known for her essay Can the Subaltern Speak?, she transformed postcolonial studies through influential work on power, representation, feminism, and literary criticism. As a longtime professor at Columbia University, Spivak has profoundly influenced generations of scholars across literature, cultural studies, and the social sciences. She was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2007.
